I haven’t posted in a long time! Been busy, been relieving some of the pressure on Twitter, been tired...
Before the meat, some garnishes:
Twitter: EdwinWiseOne, that’s me.
Projects: This and that:
* Cypress CY8C21343: MCU for a smart LED/timer/controller base for the haunt.
* New Wiki: being written from scratch (DotWiki, to be at ctdwiki.com, plus tags&links database to refactor the internet. Right now the placeholder version is slow, incomplete, and slow)
* New Website: to be put at makerbrain.com (placeholder for now), to be an outlet for my creativity. And I may even monetize it.
* New articles: in Make Magazine -- issue 18 should be, and I’ve got a bunch over the last year or so as well.
* Day job: boring, may get better, but employment is never as fun as projects. How to make projects pay?
* Haunted House: work in progress
So now on with the pedantry... Mental Models!
The old saying “seeing is believing” is wrong; it would be more accurate to say “believing is seeing”. Input from your senses passes through various circuits and scratchpads and goodness knows what in your brain, where it is collected, analyzed, abstracted, associated, and turned into symbol representations of the raw data -- which in turn are stored, manipulated, combined, forgotten, ignored, reprocessed, interpreted, and then sent back out into the world as decisions and actions.
Input -> processing -> action. It’s the old robotics control loop! Ahh, good times.
What is interesting is that our imagination, our visualization and memory retrieval processes, use many of these same circuits, but in the other direction. We hallucinate our expectations into the circuitry and these hallucinations (er, expectations) facilitate our data acquisition.
Think coke, drink milk. Look for an object but “see” it the wrong size, shape, or color (which I do all the freakin’ time by accident). Listen to yourself on a recording (where the expectation of what you sound like comes from hearing yourself inside your head, which is entirely different than what you really sound like).
In a very real sense, we invent our own reality, and what we expect to experience colors what we actually experience. It’s like a filter on a lens -- the filter does not create a new image, but it changes how we see what is there. My own model of it is as a grid that is in place, a mental grid, and all incoming information tries to snap to the corners of that grid. Things that just don’t fit ... fall through. They don’t seem to make sense, and like other noise and distractions, they are discarded.
This grid-model is also reflected in a number of computing models of intelligence, such as the old-school Hebbian learning model, where input is (essentially) clustered by statistical association and then acts as a template to classify new input. See also the more recent, though different, support vector machines (which I haven’t worked with).
I have to interject here and say that this “mental grid” is not a “real” thing but it is an abstraction, a map, a tool that I am using to make a point. It is also a model, in that it can be applied to make predictions, it can be tested to see how well it works against experience, and so forth. If I wanted to prove or disprove it, I would have to restate it as a theory and devise ways to show how accurate its predictions are... that’s science! If I do a really detailed job of it, it’s not only science but a graduate degree, but I digress. I’m not doing science here, and even though this “mental grid” model makes no claims at representing anything real, I still find it to be useful in thinking about thought.
You, with your rectilinear mental grid (for example) come across a person whose mental grid is based on a hexagonal tiling... both of you see the same world, but the pieces that survive your interpretation will in some cases be entirely different than the pieces that survive their interpretation. You have constructed different realities to match your disparate experiences, training, expectations, random chance, and biological variation.
The person who believes in ghosts lives in a different reality than the hard-boiled sceptic. Someone who really, honestly lives in a world of cause and effect with no supernatural infrastructure will interpret and decide differently than a truly religious believer.
Any form of mental grid loses information, but there is TOO MUCH information to be able to cope with without the grid. You have to filter it and assign abstract meaning in ways that make sense... and, in the long run, you have to interpret and filter in ways that allow you to make more children who will then (due to being raised in your context, trained by you both explicitly and implicitly) carry forward your way of thinking. Or, in my case, write books or stories or blog entries that try to do the same.
Yes, children rebel and explore and break away from their parent’s mold... but completely? Every time? If you were born and raised Christian, it is going to be very difficult to switch over to Islam, or Satanism. There will be concepts that you were exposed to at a very fundamental level that will sit uncomfortably in your mind, regardless of what you intellectually think is true or untrue.
Of course we change, we adapt, we re-train ourselves. But think statistically again. Ways of viewing the world and methods of organizing and filtering our sensory and experiential inputs are spread in the same way as our genes are, down from the parents and through the generations. The ideas that have the most utility at PRESERVING THEMSELVES will carry farther and longer. These are not necessarily the ideas that have the most confluence with physical reality, or even sensible expectations of how things work or how people “should” behave.
Unlike our genetics, however, our minds and our ideas can (not “do” but “can”) change with time, and better ideas can propagate out and infect the people around you. A really good idea can change the world, and this has happened again and again. A really good idea can come from anyone, though exposure to the idea is necessary for it to travel very far beyond your own skull.
Take, for example, the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. An excellent band from my adopted home town of Eugene, but no matter how great they were, it took ten years to go from being a local band to having any impact on the national scene. Growth tends to start slow and then get exponential... but growth is also done against many other bands (ideas) that are competing for the same limited resources.
My writing this journal entry is exposing this idea of the Mental Grid that I got from my father to a larger audience. If it affects the way you consider the world or your own mental landscape, then this idea will have spread a little bit more (in pure form, or mutated based on your own interpretation, it doesn’t matter) and will have a little more life in it.
This mental grid is, if you squint just right, like a street map, a high-level view of your set of mental models (which, in this cartographical analogy, could be houses. Or roads. Or something).
You have mental models of everything in your experience. You have to! That’s what we do. We see something, we categorize it, and from that category we have an instant set of expectations. See that thing over there (that brick, that house, that puddle, that stinky hippy, that uppity yuppie, that soccer mom)? What will happen if you shoot a bullet at it? Apply electricity? Kick it? Light a fire under it? Tell it you are a democrat? Tax it? Feed it hummus? Cover it in patchouli?
In many cases our mental model returns a nil result to a query... it doesn’t cover that case so you get a mental shrug of the shoulders. But if pressed hard enough, you would come up with an answer. Because that’s what we do. NOT KNOWING doesn’t mean we don’t still have a model for the context, it’s just incomplete. Or, in some cases, the question is just irrelevant to the object in question: what happens when you kick air? (okay, I have enough of a mental model of both feet and air that I have a decent answer to this... but I hope that my suck-ass example doesn’t detract from the point).
Our mental models both liberate us (I can get behind the wheel of any ordinary motorized vehicle and make it go) and shackle us (if you believe you can’t do something, you might not even try).
How can our models shackle us? Take, for example, Technology. Computers. Maybe your fancy new laptop with all the bells and whistles that you researched and purchased, and filled with exciting new games and software.
Plop it down in front of Grandma, open up Telnet, or Eagle Schematic Layout, or World of Warcraft or whatever complex aspect of your machine you are familiar with. Many Grandmas will see it and drop the whole thing, laptop and all, into their model of “fancy technology stuff that I don’t understand and am no good at.” End of story.
I don’t want to pick on Grandma, specifically, and the poor dear is an overused model anyway. Drop me in front of an engine , give me a set of wrenches, and tell me to advance the timing on the valves (or perhaps refill the blinker fluid). I’ll give you a blank stare and reach for Google, to look up a mechanic.
When your mental model for something is just a black box (see also this black box) then you tend to mash the subject of the model a few times with your fists, shake this fist at the heavens in frustration, and then throw your hands up in despair... it’s beyond you, you don’t understand it, and doesn’t work, it’s stupid, and why the hell would I care anyway?
Anger, frustration, dismissal. We all have a self image at being competent. In something, somewhere, somehow, we have a shiny nugget of self worth and value. And when we fail at something, our nugget tarnishes, and we work out strategies (right or wrong, sensible or not) to put the shine back on. Those strategies often involve devaluing the thing that caused the tarnish (see also, for example, this excellent book on cognitive dissonance).
This is part of a trend I see in the US (I would say “current trend” but it was there when I was young) to demonize the smart and the capable, the makers and thinkers, the philosopher and the mechanic (not to imply that mechanics are not philosophers or that makers are not also thinkers). The nail that sticks up gets pounded down. Heck, look to China’s not-so-distant “cultural revolution” and wonder what they were thinking. It’s not just us, it’s everyone; people don’t like to be made to feel small, stupid, or incapable.
What does this have to do with mental models, anyway?
Going back to the engine and the blank stare, for example. I have a basic model of what an engine does, and I know pretty much all of the major components (I think), but I lack any functional knowledge of how to fix, adjust, build from scratch, or even take apart such a thing. Hence, the blank stare when given the task.
What I _do_ have is a model of how to learn, of how to discover things that are unknown (debugging, the scientific method, curiosity, and obstinence are all strategies that can aid discovery), and I have a general idea of “how things work.”
That means that, given a strong enough need (strong enough to overcome my other immediate needs, like the need to sit on my ass and drink a beer, my need to exercise, or to do any of my other hundred projects) I would be able to make progress on the engine problem. I know how to break the task down, how to work through careful steps, the mental attitude required to do intricate work (e.g. slow, careful, and patient). I know how to curb my usual frustration when things go wrong or slowly, and so on and on. Not all of these pieces are the same kind of skill: some of them are emotional skills, some are intellectual; some are muscle skills; some are just from experience.
But what about your crazy girlfriend (or boyfriend) from when you were seventeen? What would they do? Could they break the problem down and make it work? How about your mom? Sibling? That one boss or co-worker who can’t seem to even figure out how the coffee machine works? How would they approach fixing an engine, or debugging a piece of code, or analyzing the timing on a new piece of hardware?
And, more important, what is your reaction when faced with the unknown, with the difficult, with the task that is beyond your reach?
The ability to approach difficult and unknown tasks is an important skill, and it is grounded in your mental models; your model of HOW to do things, and your model of WHO YOU ARE; your skills, your abilities, your emotional reactions (which I think are as much trained as they are innate), and so on. Just because your mental model says you suck at (for example) Math or Electronics or Engine Repair does not mean that it is a true model (because all models have faults), or that it can’t be changed (because nothing is truly unchangeable).
It’s easy to take our own expectations and beliefs at face value, and to limit ourselves to what we think is possible (or easy, if you are lazy). Part of our limiting mental models are grounded how we were rewarded as children, and how these rewards (and expectations) are stated -- are you rewarded for being smart or good at something, or at the work it took to attain it? Did you ever find reward intrinsic in a task, or was it all external? Were you ever challenged to do hard things, or was “lack of talent” an easy fallback? It is easy to fall back on the crutch of “oh, I can’t do that, I have no talent for it.”
Talent is, in no small part, a lie. Sure, some people are GREAT at something, and apparently with no effort. Scratch the surface, though, and in many (most?) cases you’ll find someone who sucked at the task at first but then got better through hard work and diligence.
On a related note, making things (and especially completing things) is hard, surprisingly so in light of the actual work involved in them (see, for example, The Courage to Create)
This brings me, the long (long!) way ‘round to the subject of the Maker community, and the spirit of Making. I think that being immersed in a world where people actually DO stuff and MAKE things, no matter what these things are, from crafts to complex machinery, helps you think of yourself as a capable human, able to do more than consume like good little citizens.
Making is Revolution, and changing the way you look at the world, from passive to active, is the first step.
Oh, and exercise more. Your body is your friend; if nothing else, it carries your mind around for you.